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Chromium OS, Moblin, Ubuntu Netbook Remix Benchmarks

11-23-2009, 01:10 PM

Phoronix: Chromium OS, Moblin, Ubuntu Netbook Remix Benchmarks

Intel released Moblin 2.1 earlier this month, Canonical released Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 late last month, and various other vendors have offered up their fall distribution refreshes too. Oh yeah, and Google just released the Chromium OS source code a few days ago! With all of the netbook-focused distribution updates, we found it time to run an onslaught of new benchmarks, comparing some of the leaders in this field along with running a couple full-blown desktop distributions for this round of Linux netbook benchmarking. Here are our benchmarks, including the world's first look at the Chromium OS (Chrome OS) system performance from the latest development build. Covered is everything from the video playback performance to encoding to battery power consumption and CPU/memory usage tests.

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I downloaded a VMware image of Chromium OS a couple of days ago, and ran it in VirtualBox. It boots very fast but the Chrome browser was the only app I could use, so I don't know how exactly you got to remount the root file-system. I got bored pretty quickly by it.

encoding x264 is totally irrelevant on any netbook install, and the differences on the 7z encoding could as well have been omitted from the review leaving little meat. The only big difference I can see is due to ext3/4 differences (and then moblin is going to use btrfs in the future as well...)

all in all, this review IMHO lacks quite some substance... something that won't help the targeted netbook audience nor me as a developer.

sure, phoronix is read by geeks (guilty here), but taking openarena fps as a significant test is dubious on any netbook platform unless you measure power consumption at the same time (and then the result may be skewed by the OS sacrificing FPS for power).

I know phoronix can do a lot better!

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I downloaded a VMware image of Chromium OS a couple of days ago, and ran it in VirtualBox. It boots very fast but the Chrome browser was the only app I could use, so I don't know how exactly you got to remount the root file-system. I got bored pretty quickly by it.

The videos about Chromium OS say they want to avoid the double initialization of hardware (the BIOS does it, then the kernel does all over again).

That's probably going to require something like coreboot. (Or maybe EFI... I don't know anything about EFI - maybe it can skip some of the stuff BIOS does?)

So even though the vmware image you tried boots fast, it probably still doesn't do justice to the boot speed that should result from what they're planning.

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Tell me who is to blame for the extremely bad moblin performance with vbox? And why is the generated filesystem so extremely small, thats without any reason as it only restricts the size to install extra software - it is not enough for vbox addons. With fedora it does work using:

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I don't think it is too surprising that suse utilizes its cpu most. The target with battery and cpu-usage is - (sometimes) - to use the cpu as much as possible but less than 100%. So if you slow it down, the percentage will be higher, and you save energy while at it.

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Tell me who is to blame for the extremely bad moblin performance with vbox?

long (technical) answer:

moblin is developed for netbooks, not for enthusiasts who want to run it inside a VM. Developing a netbook OS and making it run well in a VM as well is virtually impossible, since only virtualbox currently has OpenGL passthru, but it is completely dependent on the compatibility between the hosts' OpenGL capabilities, vbox's mapping to, and the client's requirements from the 3D hardware. Since moblin's UI requires hardware accelerated OpenGL (you can't make a decent UI nowadays without 3D and composite support...), it's pretty unlikely that you'll get anywhere near the native performance under any VM implementation, and vbox's OpenGL passthru isn't mature enough (or can't ever be...) to fix that hole.

People keep assuming that they can just test-drive every OS inside a VM and get 100% of the look/feel/performance of how it works on a real device, but in Moblin's case that is a totally wrong perception.

And why is the generated filesystem so extremely small, thats without any reason as it only restricts the size to install extra software

I'm not sure what you are referring to here, care to file a bugreport with numbers and debug output on bugzilla.moblin.org?